In the Now

Where Karl Lagerfeld lives.

Lagerfeld cautions, before giving a tour of his house, “You will think I’m a madman.”

Photographs by François-Marie Banier

The headquarters of Chanel are situated in two adjacent eighteenth-century buildings on the Rue Cambon, in Paris, occupying a labyrinthine suite of rooms on five floors, above a street-level Chanel boutique. One evening last December, Karl Lagerfeld, the label’s artistic director, and twenty-two assistants—hair, makeup, shoes, jewelry, music—crammed into a room on the complex’s top floor to conduct a fitting for a collection that was to be shown six days later, in Monte Carlo. Many male designers wear T-shirts and jeans not only to work but also at runway shows—as if to suggest that they are somehow above the world of trend and fashion they inhabit. Lagerfeld, who was dressed in a tight Dior suit of broad gray and blue stripes, and a pair of aviator sunglasses, disdains this practice. “I don’t think I’m too good for what I’m doing,” he says. His starched shirt had a four-inch-high collar that fit snugly under his chin, and his hair—whitened with a gesso-like dry shampoo—was pulled into a ponytail. His large belt buckle was encrusted with diamonds; his tie, looped with silver chains, was fixed with a jade Cartier clasp from the nineteen-twenties. He was wearing fingerless black biker gloves that bore silver grommets, etched with the Chanel logo, on each knuckle and were equipped, at the wrists, with small zippers that carried faintly S & M overtones. “Très chic, non?” he said, holding up a hand to be admired. A chunky Chrome Hearts ring adorned the pinkie finger, over the glove.

Lagerfeld took a seat at a long table at one end of the room. Sipping from a glass of Coke Zero—fresh glasses were brought to him at intervals on a lacquer tray by an assistant—he surveyed the fitting model, a baby-faced woman with a slim, ideally proportioned body, which Lagerfeld nevertheless judged to be a little plump. “She has maybe two kilos that she should lose,” he whispered to his top assistant, Virginie Viard. Over the next three hours, the model tried on a series of garments that Lagerfeld had spent the previous six weeks conceiving: embroidered tweed skirt suits, tulle dresses festooned with camellias, and skintight flannel-Lycra pants. Each garment provoked swooning cries from his retinue:

“Oooo, là, Karl!”

“Très jolie!”

“Superbe!”

Lagerfeld accepted the praise with a shrug. “I do my job like I breathe,” he said, in his customary manner—rapid, declamatory speech made more emphatic by a heavy German accent. “So if I can’t breathe I’m in trouble!”

Since Lagerfeld took over Chanel, in 1983, more than a decade after the death of its founder, Coco Chanel, it has become one of the most profitable luxury brands in the world, with revenues estimated at more than four billion dollars a year. (The company is privately owned and does not release earnings figures.) A significant portion of the income comes from sales of accessories and makeup, and from No. 5 perfume, which was created by Chanel herself, in 1921. But accessories and perfume cannot sustain a fashion brand’s prestige; the company must also stage extravagant runway shows featuring garments of outlandishness, originality, and fantastic expense. Lagerfeld, despite being nearly twice the age of many of his competitors at other labels (he admits to sixty-eight), has been able, season after season, to generate excitement and demand for Chanel’s clothes. “His major strength is to be about his business in the present and never have a moment for other people to think that he’s passé,” Michael Roberts, the fashion director of Vanity Fair (and, before that, of this magazine) and a friend of Lagerfeld’s for thirty years, says. Lagerfeld has maintained his preëminence for five decades, and without any visible sign of strain—unlike his contemporary Yves Saint Laurent, who, until he retired, in 2002, took a Proustian attitude to designing collections, experiencing nervous breakdowns over the hemline juste. “Yves pursued the goal of poetic designer suffering for his art,” Roberts says. “I can’t imagine Karl for one minute sitting down and thinking, I’m going to suffer for my art. Why should he? It’s just dresses, for God’s sake.”

Until recently, Lagerfeld produced eight collections a year for Chanel (both ready-to-wear and haute couture), five for the Italian luxury label Fendi, and several for labels under his own name—a staggering workload. In 2002, he added an extra Chanel show to his schedule: a high-end ready-to-wear collection designed to profile the work of the Paris métiers d’art, the ateliers that create, by hand, the embroideries, beading, tulle flowers, hats, and shoes on which couture designers rely. (Chanel bought the ateliers in 2002, but all the Paris-based couturiers use them.) The first of these so-called “satellite” collections was shown in 2002, in Paris, and it was such a commercial success that Chanel decided to give similar shows a permanent place on its calendar and to stage them in different cities.

Lagerfeld’s ability to create so much clothing for three different labels makes him unique among fashion designers, but he is also a photographer whose work appears in glossy magazines around the world. He shoots the Chanel press kits and catalogues that accompany the collections, as well as fine-art photography, which he periodically displays in galleries. (He recently had a solo exhibition in Berlin.) An avid reader in four languages—English, French, German, and Italian—Lagerfeld also publishes books; his imprint, a division of the German house Steidl, is called Édition 7L, and a few years ago he opened a bookstore, also called 7L, in space adjoining his photo studio, on the Rue Lille. Édition 7L has published forty-one titles, on subjects that range across his many interests, which include (besides fashion and photography) literature, humor, advertising, music, newspapers, mythology, illustration, and architecture. Some of these books have a bracing impracticality: an anthology of the first ten years of the magazine Interview weighed forty-three kilos and was packaged in a wooden trolley of Lagerfeld’s devising.

In 2002, however, Lagerfeld published a best-seller, “The Karl Lagerfeld Diet,” which he co-wrote with his physician, Jean-Claude Houdret. “If you attach no importance to weight problems, if not being able to wear new, trendy small-sized clothes does not cause you any regret, this book is not for you,” Lagerfeld writes in the foreword. The book combines sound weight-loss advice (cut calories) with idiosyncratic notions (avoid eating between 8 P.M. and 8 A.M.), but what made the book popular were Lagerfeld’s anecdotes about his own dramatic weight loss. [cartoon id="a12281"]

From the late eighties through the nineteen-nineties, he was a mountainous man in tentlike black suits by Japanese designers such as Yohji Yamamoto, a fan constantly aflutter at his neck. In 2000, Lagerfeld declared this look démodé, and decided to remake his silhouette to resemble that of the reedy teen-age boys who stalked the catwalks at Dior Homme in slim jackets and pants by the designer Hedi Slimane. In a year, Lagerfeld lost ninety-two pounds, enabling him to squeeze into these suits, and he has kept the weight off. (“I eat next to nothing,” he says.) Lagerfeld’s self-transformation coincided with a burst of new activity. In November, 2004, he designed a clothing line for men and women for the fashionable discount chain H & M, which plastered its stores with Lagerfeld’s image projected on two-story-high billboards. Most of the clothes sold out in the first two days, and Lagerfeld achieved a level of fame usually reserved for pop stars and movie idols. “I can no longer walk in the street,” he says. “That’s over.” In Germany last December, hundreds of photographers rushed him at an awards ceremony. That month, he had to cancel a trip to Brazil when the government concluded that the cost of providing for Lagerfeld’s security would be too great. Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue, says that Lagerfeld’s burgeoning visibility was inevitable. “There’s just so much more media focussed on fashion,” she said. “And because Karl is such a fascinating and unusual character and such an establishment figure at the same time—and of course so extraordinarily talented—it’s just been on a parallel course.” Lagerfeld professes to be unfazed by the attention; his fortune-teller notified him long ago that this would happen. “She told me, ‘The older you will be, the more success you will have.’ So it’s O.K., hmm?”

The fitting model strutted forward in a new outfit and posed in front of Lagerfeld. He scrutinized her through his dark glasses and frowned. He said that he did not like the way the assistant had arranged the neckline of the sweater the model wore. Several assistants converged on her and began to tug uncertainly at the fabric.

“Non, non!” Lagerfeld said.

He uncapped a black marker and, rings clacking, made a quick sketch on a pad in front of him. Lagerfeld derisively describes many of his colleagues as “playing the designer,” because they drape fabric on a model or a dummy; he conceives his collections at a kind of platonic remove, in multicolored drawings on paper, and only rarely touches fabric. The picture he produced—a swift hash of lines suggesting a soignée woman—reflected his skill as an illustrator. (His work has been published in numerous books and magazines.) An assistant looked at the drawing and hustled to the model to make adjustments. Lagerfeld ripped the drawing from the pad, crushed it in his hands, and tossed it into a large wicker hamper, which, over the course of the evening, filled with similar small masterpieces. “I throw everything away!” he declared. “The most important piece of furniture in a house is the garbage can! I keep no archives of my own, no sketches, no photos, no clothes—nothing! I am supposed to do, I’m not supposed to remember!” He smoothed a gloved hand over the empty page in front of him and visibly relaxed.

Unlike creative people who fear the blank page, Lagerfeld has a horror of the full page, the page that cannot be altered—the page that possesses the power to bore. All successful fashion designers are boredom detectors, on the alert for when a look is no longer novel but ubiquitous. It can be easy to miss the boredom in Lagerfeld because he’s so fleet, so mercurial—so busy. But his frenzied multitasking suggests the depths his boredom could reach, if it were allowed to gain a purchase on him. He has devoted his existence to living as much as possible in the present, keeping himself attuned to trends, not just in fashion but in art, politics, movies, and music. “I go to Colette,” he says, referring to the eclectic boutique on the Rue Saint-Honoré. “I buy all the new things, I buy all the music magazines, listen to new music.” (Last year, Lagerfeld released “My Favorite Songs,” a two-disk CD that included selections by hipster artists like Devendra Banhart, LCD Soundsystem, Super Furry Animals, the Fiery Furnaces, and Stereolab, as well as by the punk band Siouxsie and the Banshees, the bandleader Xavier Cugat, and Igor Stravinsky.) Famous among his friends for his capacity to absorb information, Lagerfeld is also renowned for his ability to translate what he consumes into fashion. “Karl reads everything, looks at everything,” the Paris fashion stylist Camille Bidault-Waddington says. “He’s permanently filling himself with independent culture and establishment culture, so basically he knows everything, and he’s like a sampling machine.” Lady Amanda Harlech, Lagerfeld’s “muse,” concurs. “He said to me once, almost in a worried way, that he has to find out everything there is to know, read everything,” she says. “The curiosity is ceaseless.”

Lagerfeld’s determination to stay current requires ruthlessness and a lack of sentimentality. He periodically rids himself of art, objects, and places that, previously, had been sources of inspiration and pleasure. People are not exempt. “He kind of passes on, because he doesn’t like the past,” one of the people who travels in Lagerfeld’s circle says. “So then he decides you’re the past and then he just puts you in the trash.” Lagerfeld says, “I have an entourage of people of today. Because people can work with me for a hundred years but they have to stay informed. And no regrets, no remove, not saying, ‘Oh, things were better then.’ ” According to his publishing partner, Gerhard Steidl, when Lagerfeld reads a thick paperback, he tears out the pages as he finishes them.

Paradoxically, Lagerfeld is a devotee of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and he has been a serious collector of Art Deco. His passion for history is reflected in his dress, a mixture of the contemporary (Dior jackets worn with skintight Diesel jeans) and the self-consciously retro, including antique jewelry and custom shirts by Hilditch & Key, with high, stiff collars that recall gentlemen like Walther Rathenau, an early-twentieth-century German Jewish industrialist who was the model for a character in Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities,” and Count Harry Kessler, a nineteenth-century Anglo-German art patron who ran a small publishing house, wrote several volumes of diaries (which Lagerfeld has read), and was legendary for his dandified style of dress. To Lagerfeld, Rathenau and Kessler represent all that was noble about Weimar Germany. “I’m German in my mind,” Lagerfeld says, “but from a Germany that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Lagerfeld’s love of blending past and present is obvious in his description of his new home, on the Quai Voltaire, on the Left Bank. Having purchased four apartments on two floors of a two-hundred-year-old building overlooking the Louvre, he is gutting the place and constructing a town house. The upper floor will contain only furniture and art made after the year 2000, including pieces by the Bouroullec brothers, Marc Newson, and others. The lower floor, Lagerfeld says, “is the Old World”; it will feature a large library furnished with pieces from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as from his Art Deco collection. Living in the house will be “like floating in your own spaceship over a very civilized past,” Lagerfeld says. (Some years ago, he bought a mansion in Biarritz, where, he says, he spent millions of dollars refurbishing it, staffed it with servants, and stocked it with a hundred and fifty thousand of his books. In 2006, after realizing that he had not visited the place in two years, he sold it.) [cartoon id="a12258"]

In preparation for the move to the Quai Voltaire, Lagerfeld recently sold the house where he has lived for the last thirty years, an eighteen-thousand-square-foot mansion on the Rue de l’Université, and one afternoon in early December he was in the process of moving out. The house, a converted hôtel particulier built in the late seventeen-hundreds, is shielded from the street by a towering porte cochere, and sits beyond a cobblestone courtyard where a white-coated valet greets visitors and leads them into a foyer the size of an average two-bedroom Manhattan apartment. Through a doorway off the foyer is a room with gold-leaf moldings, a painted ceiling, a vast crystal chandelier, and a table forty feet long, surrounded by straight-backed chairs. Lagerfeld calls this “the most beautiful room in all of Paris,” and says that it was designed by Jacques Verberckt, who decorated rooms at Versailles. But he prefers to entertain guests next door, in a small, less formal room, whose walls, from wainscot to ceiling, he has lined with rare German advertising posters from before the First World War. At the center of the room are a boxy Bauhaus sofa and an umbrella-like modernist lamp. In one corner, propped against the ornate molding, is a life-size cardboard cutout of Lagerfeld, glowering in dark glasses, from the H & M advertising campaign.

Lagerfeld was scheduled to attend a dinner party at eight but declined to say where. “I hate name-dropping,” he said. Asked if the host was someone famous, he pursed his lips and muttered, “I am not knowing so many unknown people, hmm?” Indeed, he calls Mick Jagger “Micky.” (Later, one of Lagerfeld’s friends revealed that his hostess that evening was Mme. Chirac.) Recently, however, Lagerfeld claims to have lost almost all interest in going out. “I’m not a social person,” he says. “Not that I’m not at ease. I’m pretty good, but it bores me. Not the people, but the whole thing. What for? It’s not very productive. I only want to do what I have to do: fashion, photography, books. And that’s all.” He hates the telephone, and communicates with the outside world primarily through faxes, which he writes in flowing script with a fountain pen. “I have a direct line, but I don’t even remember the number,” he says. “I have cell phones, but I don’t use them. Personally, it is nearly impossible to reach me.” He insists that he is never lonely. “This is another cliché—the loneliness,” he says in mocking tones. “I have to fight to be alone! And you have to recharge the batteries. People who can’t be alone have a problem. Loneliness is a luxury for people like me.”

Lagerfeld likes to insist that his passion for knowledge is a private matter: “There is only one thing I am really interested in, and that is knowing—not for display or conversation or discussion. I never discuss.” He adds, with a Wildean flourish, “I like to look very superficial.” But he seems to need to demonstrate that he is a man whose interests transcend fashion—this, despite his repeated avowals that he does not think he’s too good for what he does. He frequently mentions his love for the poetry of Rilke and Emily Dickinson, and holds forth on the war poet Alan Seeger, whose work Édition 7L has published; but he does not discuss these subjects as an intellectual might—quoting lines from memory, analyzing themes. Rather, they are passing references in a zigzagging monologue, in which the words and ideas tumble out at such speed that they become almost unintelligible—digressions within digressions. “For me, the perfect writing is E. B. White—that’s how one should write English,” he told me at his home on the Rue de l’Université. “The sound, the language, what it evokes for me. I see New York with the eyes of his book about New York. Like Colette in French. Even someone like Léautaud—whom you probably don’t know. Léautaud was the son of a courtesan and his father was a bad actor who became a souffleur in the Comédie-Française—you know, the one who sits in a box onstage and whispers lines to the actors when they forget them? Prompter! He wrote three books and then he started a publishing house, a very good one, the Mercure de France, and stayed all his life there as the editor of the Mercure literature review, and he loved cats and animals—which I’m not crazy for. Everything he did all of his life, I don’t like, but his writing, for me, his descriptions of Paris—I go to the street where he went for fifty, sixty years, and I see it only with his eyes. He became famous in France in the fifties because Robert Mallet, from the Sorbonne, made on the radio—because there was no television—conversations with him, which were recorded. And I have them on CD; his voice is like an actor from another era. It’s like Colette; she speaks French from an era that nobody speaks like this; they used to pronounce their ‘r’ very differently in French”—he demonstrates an “r” rolled with a trill in the front of the mouth, then hurries on: “I read poetry a lot and I even publish poetry. I made an edition of a woman called Catherine Pozzi, who was the mistress of Paul Valéry—she was married to a man who wrote plays, but they divorced quickly and she was the daughter of a famous doctor. You know the painting of Sargent’s of a very handsome man in a red robe? That was her father, the very famous Dr. Pozzi, who was Sarah Bernhardt’s doctor and lover and…”

Lagerfeld spoke like this, almost without interruption, for nearly two hours. He then nodded discreetly to his hovering manservant, who vanished, then quickly reappeared with a silver salver upon which sat a pitcher of water, an empty glass, a foil envelope, and a spoon. Lagerfeld sprinkled brown powder from the envelope into the glass, added just enough water to wet the granules, then used the spoon to stir the mixture into a thick paste that resembled chocolate pudding but was, he said, protein. He spooned the substance into his mouth without relish, swallowed it, and was soon speaking again, about his plans to reprint the work of a once-popular poet named Anna de Noailles—“who was born Anna de Brancovan, and was of Romanian descent, and who was one of the first women elected to the Académie in Belgium—not in France, because she died in 1933—and her poetry is stunning.…”

Finally, Lagerfeld stopped talking and agreed to give a tour of the house. After warning, “You will think I’m a madman,” he led the way up a grand curving marble staircase. The second floor is composed of huge rooms with soaring ceilings, ornate plasterwork, wood panelling, and fifteen-foot-high mirrors. The furniture, a mixture of antique and modernist pieces, was almost impossible to see, hidden under hundreds of magazines, CDs, photographs, promotional brochures, and books, which lay in heaps spilling on every surface, including the floors. Scattered through the rooms were dozens of iPod nanos of every hue. Each one was loaded with songs that Lagerfeld listens to when designing his collections, which he does, he says, usually in the mornings, while dressed in a long white smock. Surveying the scene through his black glasses, Lagerfeld said serenely, “Normal people think I’m insane.” [cartoon id="a12238"]

He spends most of his time in a thousand-square-foot room, at the center of which sat a modern fourposter bed. The posts were made of fluorescent bulbs, and a sable bedspread was strewn with paperbacks and magazines and more iPods. Lagerfeld says that he sleeps seven hours a night in this bed; he also spends considerable time lounging on it during his waking hours, reading and drawing. There was a large desk a few feet away, piled with papers, sketchbooks, magazines, books, newspapers, and art supplies. Lagerfeld complains that his desk kept getting “buried.” To deal with the problem, he recently bought four more desks. They got buried, too. A Mac G5 computer was visible among the messy stacks of books and papers on a long table at the foot of his bed, but Lagerfeld insists that he rarely uses it and does not surf the Internet—partly because he is fearful of how it might compromise his privacy. “I don’t want to be on the Internet,” he said. “I hardly use a credit card—everything where you can be fixed. I’m floating. Nobody can catch me, mmm?”

He led the way into a room that had a huge table heaped with more books, CDs, DVDs, photographs, iPods, and magazines. “Look,” he said, sounding a little amazed. “It goes on and on and on.” He considered for a moment. “But I love it!” He claims to know where everything is, and it’s not an idle boast. On several occasions during the afternoon, he disappeared into these rooms to fetch things, including a copy of the Colette novel “Mitsou,” which provided the inspiration for a recent Chanel photo campaign that he had shot, and a copy of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” which he had illustrated with paintings made entirely with cosmetics. He returned in minutes with the books.

“This is the room for the jeans, the shirts, the jewelry, the ties, the gloves, and things like this,” he said, entering a narrow room lined with shelves. On the top of a bureau were perhaps two hundred pairs of fingerless gloves, arranged in neat piles according to color (he explained that he chose the gray pair he’s wearing because of the overcast sky). There are also dozens of pairs of jeans, and belts laid out by the hundred. In a tray on another bureau were tangles of Chrome Hearts necklaces, rings, buckles, clasps, pins, brooches; on shelves below, scores of white shirts were stacked. Next door was a windowless room containing a dozen garment racks on wheels, each one stuffed with suits—perhaps five hundred in all—in black or gray hues. “I have suits here I’ve never worn,” Lagerfeld said. “To normal people it may look sick, huh?” He shrugged. “I don’t know what ‘normal’ means, anyway.” He went into a room that looked like a bookstore stockroom during the Christmas season, and suddenly his attention was caught by a stack of dusty leather-bound tomes. “This is something I want to publish,” he said, opening the book at the top of the stack. “This is the first German illustrated weekly paper, called the Neue Berliner Illustrierte. And thank God it was preserved, because very little survived. This is a complete set. I just found it in Germany.”

In a small anteroom, amid more heaped books and magazines, was a black and red grand piano of sleek modernistic design. “I designed this for the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Steinway,” Lagerfeld said. “I’m not very gifted as a piano player, so I’m giving it away as a Christmas gift.” At the base of a small armchair were six plastic bags stuffed with folded papers. “These are newspapers I bought and haven’t had time to read yet,” he said. “I go through the most important, and the rest are unimportant things—they can wait.”

For Lagerfeld, the value of all this information is less in the design ideas it might incite than as a hedge against his fear that he is slipping behind. Daily headlines, he says, “give the air of the moment. It is like music, which is like the coloration of the air. It puts you in a mood. It’s for the attitude, for the feeling. That’s why it’s important.” Lagerfeld is evasive about what inspires his work, but it’s obvious that he adjusts not just his pen but his personality to whichever of the three fashion houses he is working for. In contrast to his designs for Chanel (which are fragile, poetic, and feminine) and Fendi (which have a kind of hard-edged extroversion), those for his Karl Lagerfeld line are often sombre, reflecting the gray skies and bleakness of rural northern Germany, where he grew up. For his fall-winter, 2006, Karl Lagerfeld and Lagerfeld Collection lines, he sent down the runway emaciated models in tattered shifts of brown, black, and gray—a grim display that prompted reviewers to use the word “post-apocalyptic.” After the show, Lagerfeld gave an interview to Tim Blanks, of Style.com, in which he cited as influences on the collection Strindberg’s plays, Munch’s paintings, the stark tales of Isak Dinesen, and Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.” “We live in a dark and romantic and quite tragic world,” Lagerfeld said. “So I think they are right for the moment, hmm?” Blanks asked, “Do you respond to current events that directly?” “You do it without knowing it,” Lagerfeld replied. “I have the feeling this mood is in the air.” (Lagerfeld’s fall, 2007, collection, which he presented two weeks ago, in Paris, was similarly austere, featuring tailored pieces in dark colors paired with flat black boots.)

Perhaps the most revealing index to Lagerfeld’s creative mind—to his insistence on keeping history alive even as he professes the need to forget it—was a room on the first floor at the end of a crooked hallway, which he saved for the end of his house tour. Here, Lagerfeld had reassembled his childhood bedroom, using the furniture and art that he had as a seven-year-old in Germany. Hanging on a wall just outside the bedroom was an oil painting that his mother gave to him when he was a boy, depicting Voltaire meeting Frederick the Great of Prussia: a group of eighteenth-century courtiers in velvet coats and powdered periwigs. “This is how I dreamed life should be,” Lagerfeld said. “Can you imagine—at seven?”

Last September, Alicia Drake, a British fashion writer based in Paris, published a book titled “The Beautiful Fall,” a chronicle of the fashion demimonde of Paris in the nineteen-seventies and of a bitter rivalry that arose between Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent. The designers declined to talk to Drake, but she managed to interview Lagerfeld’s eighty-nine-year-old cousin, Kurt, months before he died, as well as some friends, colleagues, mentors, and muses whom Lagerfeld has become estranged from over the decades: Anna Piaggi, a longtime contributor to Italian Vogue; Gilles Dufour, a former protégé and assistant for twenty-five years; Gaby Aghion, a former mentor and a co-founder of the label Chloé, where Lagerfeld worked for two decades; and the designer Paloma Picasso.

Lagerfeld’s Chanel show in Monte Carlo featured the handmade creations of the métiers d’art, on which the couture designers rely.

Drake argues that Lagerfeld was born, in Hamburg, not in 1938, as he has long claimed, but in 1933—a fact attested to by his cousin Kurt, a schoolmate, and a neighbor. Lagerfeld reacted to the book with rage. “It’s the dirtiest thing in the world,” he told me. “Everything is fixed; there’s not one person I know well who talked—only people I had fired, or whom I hardly know, or who never existed.” He sued Drake for invasion of privacy. (On January 15th, a French court dismissed Lagerfeld’s suit, and he was ordered to pay Drake’s legal fees.) Drake’s book also includes admiring descriptions of Lagerfeld’s designs and work ethic, but Lagerfeld was not appeased. “Maybe I don’t want to seem hardworking!” he told me.

Lagerfeld’s parents were cultured people whose idea of small talk was to debate the religious philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin over dinner. Christian Lagerfeld, his father, made a fortune in condensed milk; his mother, Elisabeth, played the violin. In the mid-thirties, as Hitler rose to power, Lagerfeld’s father moved the family to an isolated country estate in northern Germany, where Karl, his older sister, and a half sister from his father’s first marriage were raised. Lagerfeld has said that he knew nothing of the Nazis and the war; but, according to Drake’s interviews with Kurt Lagerfeld (whose credibility Karl has challenged) and with neighbors of Karl’s, the Lagerfeld family suffered severe deprivations. In a letter that Lagerfeld wrote to Drake, and which was quoted extensively in Women’s Wear Daily, the designer refuted this characterization: “There was food all the time and [your] description of the end of the war is very romantic, but it was very different.… The farmers were not poor people with three cows.” In a p.s., he added, “I felt loved and protected by my parents—in a time like the ’40s when it was not easy to have a protected life.”

As a boy, Lagerfeld read precociously, including “Das Nibelungenlied” and the letters of Liselotte von der Pfalz, also known as the Princess Palatine, a member of the court of Louis XIV. At school, he was a good student, but friendless. “I was too exotic for where I was,” he told me. “I hated the company of other children. I wanted to be a grownup person, to be taken seriously. I hated the idea of childhood; I thought it was a moment of endless stupidity.” He was devoted to his mother, who seemed rarely to miss an opportunity to criticize him. He has said that he decided never to smoke cigarettes after his mother told him that his hands were exceptionally ugly and that smoking would only draw attention to them; she also told him that his stories were “so boring” that he should hurry up and tell them—he says this accounts for his rapid speech. Lagerfeld recounts these instances of maternal cruelty without self-pity and even defends his mother, saying that children’s stories are indeed boring. His mother was tough, he concedes, “but right for a boy with a head like this”—he throws his hands wide apart.

From an early age, he snipped pictures from fashion magazines and was “very critical” of the way his classmates dressed. But Lagerfeld’s devotion to fashion also has an intellectual dimension. He is fascinated by the manner in which clothes reflect the times and attitudes of their wearers. He mentions a project conceived by Albert Kahn, an eccentric banker who lived in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century. Kahn hoped to construct an “Archives of the Planet,” and to that end dispatched photographers and filmmakers around the world to document, essentially, everything. At one point, according to Lagerfeld, Kahn set up a movie camera on a Paris street corner, and every day for ten years filmed people walking by. “You see the houses, you see the cars—and there were few changes in ten years,” says Lagerfeld, who has viewed the footage. “The cars changed not that much. The architecture changed not at all. But the attitude of the people changed much more, in the way they walked, in the way they dressed. So don’t tell me fashion is not important.”

As a boy living in the country, Lagerfeld had little exposure to high fashion. He found a book on Paul Poiret, the French designer who, in 1906, created a line of unstructured clothes that liberated women from the corseted constraints of nineteenth-century dresses, but he did not attend a fashion show until he was in his early teens, after his family had moved back to Hamburg. There, in the early fifties, Lagerfeld saw a Christian Dior show and a Jacques Fath show. “I loved it—the mood, what it projected, the idea of a life,” he says. “Because I spent my childhood thinking that I was born too late, that I had missed all this fabulous life before the war, the ocean liners, the Orient Express.” Dreary postwar Hamburg was hardly the place to try to re-create such a life. “My idea was—and this is precise in my mind—‘Let’s get out of here,’ ” Lagerfeld says. His mother agreed, telling him, “Here, there is nothing for you to do. Germany is a dead country.”

Lagerfeld moved to Paris while still in his teens. After he had been there for two years, he saw an advertisement for an international design competition sponsored by an organization called the International Wool Secretariat; he submitted sketches and fabric samples and won in the coat category, for a long overcoat with a high neckline and a plunging V-shaped opening in the back. (Yves Saint Laurent, then seventeen, won for a cocktail dress, and the two became friends.) Lagerfeld was immediately hired as a junior assistant at Balmain, the haute-couture house. The work was gruelling; for three weeks after each collection, Lagerfeld and the other assistants spent days sketching embroideries, flowers, seams, and silhouettes for pattern makers and buyers (photocopiers did not yet exist). “I thought the backstage atmosphere was terrible,” Lagerfeld says. “But I said to myself, ‘You’re not here as an art critic, you’re here to learn, so shut up and look.’ ” After six months, he was made apprentice to Pierre Balmain. But after three years he left—“because I wasn’t born to be an assistant.” For three years, he worked as artistic director at the House of Patou, where he produced couture collections in the style of the label’s creator, Jean Patou. But by 1961 Lagerfeld had become impatient with designing formal, made-to-measure clothing for rich women. Couture, he says, “became very dowdy and very bourgeois and it was just not trendy.” Lagerfeld decided that the most innovative ideas in fashion were in ready-to-wear, a branch of the industry long disdained by serious designers. He quit Patou, and hired himself out as a freelance ready-to-wear designer. [cartoon id="a12214"]

He was soon producing collections simultaneously for French, Italian, English, and German companies, including Chloé (where he became head designer), Krizia, Ballantyne, Cadette, Charles Jourdan, and Mario Valentino, where he was received as an exciting new talent, with a knack for capturing cultural trends and obsessions in his designs. Drake quotes Anne-Marie Muñoz, a fashion assistant who was a friend of Lagerfeld’s at the time: “He designed shoes, bags, hair combs, blouses, pens, tables.… He was always flicking through books, passionate about a subject, interested, surrounded by paper.” Lagerfeld also created wardrobes for movies, opera, and the theatre. In 1967, he added to his list of clients Fendi, a handbag and fur company based in Rome. “They hired him to do the fur,” Joan Juliet Buck, a writer and the former editor of French Vogue, who at the time was a close friend, says. “And he throws out these unbelievable challenges: let’s line fur in fur, let’s knit fur, let’s tear fur up, let’s make holes in fur, let’s paint on fur, let’s paint on shearling. I remember when gold felt-tipped pens came out, suddenly everything in the Fendi collection had gold curlicues on it, as if he were indulging the pleasure of scribbling on clothes.’ ”

Two decades before it became de rigueur for designers to do so, Lagerfeld haunted flea markets and thrift shops for vintage dresses, dismantling them in order to learn the secrets of their construction and design. He studied books on Madeleine Vionnet and the other pioneers of fashion from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and he translated this knowledge into his work, pairing historical references with contemporary trends. Lagerfeld became a fixation of the fashion press, which chronicled his life and style, noting the changes in his home décor, and his habit of dressing in Edwardian collars and ascots, and wearing a monocle. When he moved into the house on the Rue de l’Université, in 1977, he did not use electricity in some of the rooms but lit them with candles. Buck visited him there. “It was extraordinarily beautiful,” she says. “I slept in this bedroom with a lit à la polonaise, with a semicircular canopy—very high, with ostrich feathers on top. Next to that room was his study, and he slept in this tiny little room that had the actual lacquer furniture that had belonged to Mme. de Pompadour.”

Lagerfeld was a conspicuous presence at parties in Paris and New York in the seventies, but he maintained a detached attitude, passing on the drugs and alcohol in which his colleagues indulged. “I observed it like an inside outsider,” he says of the seventies bacchanal. “I have nothing against it, but I have one instinct stronger than any other thing in life, and that is the instinct for survival.” In the early seventies, however, Lagerfeld fell in love with a witty and mischievous French aristocrat named Jacques de Bascher. Lagerfeld supported him financially, but they never lived together, and friends say that the union was—as Lagerfeld has always insisted—platonic, based on shared affinities for literature, clothing, and style. (De Bascher once told a journalist that Lagerfeld’s sole loves were Coca-Cola and chocolate cake.) When de Bascher died of AIDS, in 1989, Lagerfeld was inconsolable; he sobbed when discussing him with a reporter for Vanity Fair in 1992. In his diet book, he says that his weight gain, which began in the late nineteen-eighties, was due to his despair over de Bascher’s illness and death. Today, however, Lagerfeld insists that he is above such attachments, adopting the attitude he expressed in a conversation with Interview in 1975, in which he said, “I never fall in love. I am just in love with my job.” In this way, Lagerfeld seems to be modelling himself on another prolific creator with a sense of the Zeitgeist, Andy Warhol. The two were friends; in the early seventies, Warhol cast Lagerfeld as an aristocratic German Lothario in a film called “L’Amour.” “Not a masterpiece,” says Lagerfeld, who discourages comparisons between himself and Warhol. “First of all, I’m better groomed. And, also, he pushed people. I never push people. There was something more perverted in his mind than in mine.”

By the early nineteen-eighties, Lagerfeld had become one of the world’s most respected and successful designers, though outside the fashion industry his name was not widely known, because, unlike other young designers, such as Pierre Cardin and Saint Laurent, he did not have his own label. “When people were shoving their names on everything, he said, ‘I don’t care about that,’ ” Joan Juliet Buck says. “He didn’t believe in building his own empire. He liked the gun-for-hire thing.” In 1982, Alain Wertheimer, the chairman of Chanel, approached Lagerfeld about designing for the label.

Coco Chanel had died eleven years earlier, and sales had declined sharply. By 1982, the label was little more than a perfume company with some clothing boutiques. The iconic Chanel suit—a tight-shouldered, boxy tweed jacket and matching knee-length skirt—was seen as a dowdy throwback for, as Buck put it, “middle-aged lady politicians in the provinces.” Lagerfeld’s friends advised him not to accept Wertheimer’s offer. “Everybody said, ‘Don’t touch it, it’s dead, it will never come back,’ ” Lagerfeld says. “But by then I thought it was a challenge.” The job involved designing not only the Chanel ready-to-wear line but also the haute couture—an area in which Lagerfeld had not worked for twenty years. But he sensed that the culture was changing. “Ready-to-wear had become like a kind of fake couture,” he says. “So I said, ‘Let’s do the real stuff.’ ”

But the “real stuff” had also changed. “Before, fashion was easy, in a way,” Lagerfeld says. “There was the couture collection—people were inspired by that, they copied it, and that was the fashion in the world. Now fashion comes from the street, from other designers, from ready-to-wear, so high fashion has to be the fashion of the moment.” With these precepts in mind, Lagerfeld remade Chanel by acknowledging the brand’s history but treating it with irreverence. He lampooned the Chanel suit, shrinking it into a micromini and a midriff-baring jacket; covering it with oversize double-C logos; and pairing it on the runway with quilted running shoes, sequinned hot pants, and giant neck chains inspired by rappers. In doing so, he erased any hint of bourgeois fustiness and created among the young, trendy, and moneyed a mania for the label.

Lagerfeld’s bad-girl take was contrary to everything that Chanel herself had stood for: dignity, restraint, and a style of clothing that allowed women to dress in as confident and comfortable a manner as men do. Yves Saint Laurent told Le Monde, “At Chanel, they have chains everywhere, strips of leather. I see things that are frightening, sadomasochistic.” Holly Brubach, writing in 1989 in this magazine, applauded Lagerfeld’s creative energy but accused him of “desecrating the Chanel style with sight gags and overkill, with a tarty sex appeal and crass sensationalism.” [cartoon id="a12234"]

Lagerfeld scoffs at such criticisms: “They said, ‘Oh, Chanel would be shocked to death!’ But they didn’t want the homage—the respectful shit—either. So to survive you have to cut the roots to make new roots. Because fashion is about today. You can take an idea from the past, but, if you do it the way it was, no one wants it.” Lagerfeld’s success at revitalizing the Chanel brand inspired similar makeovers at other fashion houses, including Gucci (which hired Tom Ford), Dior (John Galliano), Louis Vuitton (Marc Jacobs), Lanvin (Alber Elbaz), Balenciaga (Nicolas Ghesquière), and Burberry (Christopher Bailey). “It’s thanks to Karl and Chanel that all the other fashion companies realized that they could use the name of a dead person,” Buck says. “He started the Lazarus movement.”

Five days after the fitting at Chanel’s Rue Cambon headquarters, Lagerfeld flew to Monte Carlo to prepare for the fashion show. He owns a house in Monaco and travels there often, primarily to see his friend Princess Caroline of Hanover, the daughter of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier. Some two hundred of Lagerfeld’s closest friends—artists, editors, photographers, models, actresses—and a large contingent of reporters also converged on Monaco for two days of events related to the Chanel fashion show.

The morning Lagerfeld arrived, he held a final fitting for the collection, which would be shown the next day on the stage of the Monte Carlo opera house, before an audience of more than four hundred and fifty people. At noon, he met with his assistants in the opera house’s cramped basement to choose the accessories that the models would wear. After five hours, the assistants looked glazed and morose in the airless, overheated room, which was lit with harsh fluorescent lights. Lagerfeld, however, remained energetic, full of laughter and catty asides. “She’s the toughest dyke of all,” he muttered after a fierce-looking blond model had finished posing in front of him. He shouted instructions about the clothes to his assistants and helped select jewelry and shoes, while giving an interview to a reporter from Women’s Wear Daily, who sat at his right elbow.

A few feet away, offering the occasional opinion about a necklace or a pair of earrings, was Amanda Harlech, a lithe, forty-seven-year-old with black hair and green eyes that slant upward. Since defecting, in 1997, from the camp of John Galliano, to whom she had played muse for a dozen years, Harlech has been fulfilling that role for Lagerfeld at Chanel. “She is an inspiration, because she wears the clothes I make, and she mixes them with other things and is very inventive herself,” Lagerfeld says. “And she creates an atmosphere that is very important.” Harlech says, “Officially, I’m the outside pair of eyes. The thing about Karl is that he is never happy with what he’s done. However perfect that dress”—she gestures at a model wearing a black lace gown with a smattering of flowers and frayed tulle at the sleeves—“it already begs a question of the next thing. The moment the show opens, he’s already foreseeing the actual set of the next one. This man never alights. He’s on the wing. Photographs, buildings, collections, possessions.”

Lagerfeld, who had been looking through a box filled with shoes, approached Harlech. He leaned in close and mumbled a joke about a mutual acquaintance who evidently suffered from “fat legs and bad breath.” Harlech whooped with laughter and wagged a finger at him. Lagerfeld giggled, then turned a slow half-pirouette and returned to work.

Lagerfeld likes to foster envy and competitiveness among his retinue. “It would be too frightening, to start going inside that kingdom, the court, and all the liaisons dangereuses,” the person who travels in Lagerfeld’s circle but is not an intimate friend told me. “It’s like Louis XIV.” Everyone in his entourage knows the stories of former favorites who were summarily jettisoned, either for perceived slights and betrayals or because they had begun to bore Lagerfeld. This makes for an anxious atmosphere, as was clear that evening, when Lagerfeld hosted an informal dinner for Princess Caroline and a hundred or so friends. (A few fashion reporters were also invited.) The dinner was at Rampoldi, a small French-Italian restaurant that occupies a long, grotto-like space on Monaco’s main commercial street. The guests—who included the co-founder and editor of the magazine Purple Fashion, Olivier Zahm, his face unshaven, his long, unwashed brown hair falling around his shoulders—reflected Lagerfeld’s fascination with the Parisian hipsters from whom he draws ideas for his collections. Lagerfeld greeted Bidault-Waddington, the stylist, who is married to the British rock star Jarvis Cocker. Tall, slim, and doe-eyed, Bidault-Waddington, who has never styled for Lagerfeld, was under no illusions about the reason for her inclusion in Lagerfeld’s entourage. “Basically, I’m good friends with them, and I like their stuff, and, because I’m funny, they invite me everywhere,” she said. “For ambience, let’s say.” (The next day, Lagerfeld noticed the top-stitching on the pockets of her Chloé dress. “He said it was a special stitch, and he named it,” Bidault-Waddington said later. “He looked at it like some kind of specialist—like a doctor. He analyzes everything in a second.”)

Also present at Rampoldi was the rock musician Cat Power, whose real name is Chan Marshall. Lagerfeld met Marshall last year, outside the Mercer Hotel, in New York. She was dressed in her habitual combination of jeans, T-shirt, and boots, and was smoking a cigarette while slouched on a pile of her luggage. Lagerfeld was enchanted, telling her that only a true woman could get away with smoking like that. She is now a more or less constant presence at Lagerfeld’s gatherings, flown to Chanel fashion shows and events, at the company’s expense. (In January, Marshall and her band performed the music for the Chanel couture show at the Grand Palais, in Paris.)

The dinner was scheduled for eight-thirty, and by a quarter to nine most of the guests had arrived. But an hour later there was still no sign of Lagerfeld or Princess Caroline, and the mood was starting to sour. Lagerfeld is famous for keeping people waiting, sometimes because of work obligations but also sometimes for effect. Colombe Pringle, the editor of French Vogue from 1987 to 1994, who has known Lagerfeld for more than thirty years, strained in her seat to see the head table, where his and the Princess’s chairs sat empty. Turning back to her tablemates, she said, “It’s opera! They’re building something! So everyone is wondering, Why isn’t he here, it’s 10 P.M.! ” She laughed. “Karl is onstage.” When Pringle was asked if she considered herself a friend of Lagerfeld’s, she frowned. “You can never say you’re a friend of Karl’s,” she said. “He can only say that about you.” She lit a cigarette. “He’s a diva.” [cartoon id="a12296"]

Finally, Lagerfeld appeared with the Princess and her daughter Charlotte. He was in his usual white high-collared shirt, but he had traded his Dior suit for one by a young Japanese design team. His black jacket was a modern take on the eighteenth-century cutaway, with lapels that buttoned back and a slightly flaring tail. He did not remove his aviator sunglasses as he took his place at the head table with the Princess. Also with Lagerfeld was a wholesome-looking model named Brad Kroenig, from St. Louis, who is the subject of a book of photographs by Lagerfeld called “One Man Shown”; and Stephen Gan, a founding editor of the art magazine Visionaire. Gan is a member of Lagerfeld’s innermost circle; backstage at fashion shows, Lagerfeld bestows on him the quick arm squeezes and whispered bon mots that he reserves for his closest confidants. Gan was shown to the table where Pringle was seated, and she demanded, “Where were you?” Gan said that he had joined Lagerfeld for cocktails. At this news, Gan’s tablemates visibly stiffened. Over dinner, the talk was of Karl: his prodigious spending, his penchant for “getting rid of what he loves,” his renunciation of sex.

At the end of the meal, a waiter materialized and, in full view of the forty or so other diners at the table, placed a small glass of Sauternes in front of Gan, saying, with a quick nod toward Lagerfeld, at the head table, that it was from “the gentleman.” All eyes went from Lagerfeld—impassive behind his black shades—to the glass of Sauternes, which seemed to cower on the tablecloth. Gan smiled sheepishly before taking a sip.

At a few minutes past midnight, Lagerfeld, Caroline, and Charlotte stood and began to walk toward the door. The other guests crowded after them. Lagerfeld lingered on the sidewalk outside for twenty minutes, saying goodbye to the Princess and her daughter, as they stood by the open door of a stretch limousine. Several feet away, a small group of Lagerfeld’s friends waited, among them Harlech, Gan, Bidault-Waddington, and Zahm. Royal protocol dictated that the guests should not approach or speak to the Princess without an invitation to do so.

“Look at that schmooze!” a dark-haired woman said under her breath, as Lagerfeld and the Princess spoke animatedly to each other.

“What do you think they’re saying?” her companion asked.

She popped her lips as if to imply that the answer couldn’t be more obvious. “Telling each other how marvellous they are!” she said.

Ten minutes later, Lagerfeld had seen the Princess off and returned to his friends. He approached the dark-haired woman, who smiled radiantly, accepted Lagerfeld’s air kisses, and told him that he looked marvellous.

At ten-thirty the next morning, Lagerfeld arrived at the crowded backstage area of the Monte Carlo opera house, where the fashion show was to begin thirty minutes later. He looked rested, even though he had been up until 4 A.M., drinking Coke Max and chatting with Gan, Kroenig, and Harlech, and a few others from Chanel—all of whom, despite being several decades younger than Lagerfeld, looked distinctly the worse for wear. In the theatre’s basement, a dozen silent, waxen-faced models were draped over the furniture in attitudes of apparent exhaustion, casting wistful looks at a buffet table, across the room. Finally, one model approached the table. She selected a single grape from a bunch, inspected it carefully, and ate it.

Lagerfeld swept by, waggled his fingers at the models by way of a greeting, and proceeded to a corner of the room, where a makeup artist was brushing powder over a girl’s face—executing in foundation, rouge, mascara, and lipstick Lagerfeld’s directive to evoke both Audrey Hepburn and the Ballets Russes. Then Lagerfeld, followed by five or six assistants, climbed a short, unlit staircase, hurried through a maze of scrims, and emerged onto the stage. Through the closed velvet stage curtain, he could hear the guests taking their seats on the other side. Someone asked him how he felt. His face, behind his dark glasses, did not change. “I have no human feelings,” he replied. He moved to the wings, where he could give a final tweak to the clothes before the models went onstage.

In the meantime, Princess Caroline had arrived, and, in a break with tradition, had seated herself not in the royal box, at the back of the theatre, but in the front row, the better to see Lagerfeld’s creations. The curtain went up, and for twenty minutes the models paced the stage in Lagerfeld’s latest take on the Chanel lady-who-lunches, this time with references to Diaghilev: short skirts in a black-and-white harlequin pattern of sequins, jersey knit dresses with plunging necklines, and a pink gauzy dress trailing pompoms of tulle that suggested a fancy poodle. (The actress Rinko Kikuchi, from “Babel,” wore the dress a few weeks later at the Golden Globe Awards.) In keeping with the objective of highlighting the work of the ateliers, several garments were encrusted with embroidery, beads, sequins, and jewelry. There was lots of tulle. (“If you want to create allure, veil it,” Lagerfeld told a reporter afterward.)

The rococo theatre lacked a central runway; the models were confined within the proscenium arch, where they paced back and forth a few times before exiting stage left or stage right. This constraint, coupled with a muffled soundtrack that mixed classical music with snippets of throbbing Euro-techno dance beats, made for a show strangely lacking in heat and excitement. When Lagerfeld appeared under the lights for his bow, there was only one cry of “À bon, Karl!” and the applause was polite. Lagerfeld seemed indifferent to the crowd’s reaction. As the audience filed out, he was mobbed by television reporters and for nearly an hour answered questions in three languages. (“When a woman is getting up in the morning, and gets dressed, and puts on her favorite Chanel, what should be her attitude?”)

Finally, Lagerfeld departed for the Hôtel de Paris, across the street, where a large lunch reception was in full swing. He stuck close by the Princess, making small talk for several hours with a stream of wealthy-looking older men and women. He left briefly, to change clothes, and was back at the opera house by early evening, to attend the Nijinsky Awards gala, a biennial event, presided over by Princess Caroline, that celebrates the achievements of choreographers and dancers. Lagerfeld took the stage to praise the honorees, then sat in the audience to watch two long dance performances. Afterward, he accompanied the Princess and his entourage to an opulent room at the Hôtel de Paris, where he attended a black-tie dinner for four hundred. At midnight, many of the guests, now at the end of a second day of non-stop socializing, disappeared to their rooms. [cartoon id="a12274"]

Lagerfeld, however, was brimming with energy. Commandeering a grand carpeted staircase at the hotel, he directed his assistants to set up a portable photography studio, which included a Mac laptop, lights, and an array of digital cameras. He proceeded to take photographs of the Princess, Charlotte, her brother Andrea, the Nijinsky Award winners, his assistants, and any other member of his retinue who was still standing. Wielding a large black camera, he directed his subjects to pose this way and that, reaching over to adjust an arm or a leg. He took photographs the way he sketches: fast—popping off shots, then diving over to the laptop to see the results on the screen. “It’s not bad, non?” he would announce, before racing back to his subject to shoot another round of pictures. By 3 A.M., the large group of people on the stairs had dwindled to twenty or so. The two men working the computer hung their heads and rubbed their eyes, yawning, and slumped in their folding chairs. Amanda Harlech, in a navy-blue Chanel gown of tiered ruffles, waved away a waiter who had materialized with a tray of champagne and said she was about to collapse. Lagerfeld, unaware, or uninterested, hurried over and told her to get under the lights and pose, which she did without complaint. By 4 A.M., even the most concerted night owls could take it no more. Olivier Zahm, his hair falling over his tinted sunglasses, a chewed half-smoked cigar hanging from his mouth, and a glass of flat champagne in his hand, stumbled across the lobby to his room. Behind him, Lagerfeld’s camera continued to snap away. ♦

John Colapinto became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 2006. He is the author of “Undone.”